0. The last sentence of his essay.
1. Significantly, Huxley's title is rendered into Russian as The Beautiful New World.
2. "The Sublime is an object whose positive body is just an embodiment of Nothing" (Zizek 1989: 206). Among other useful things done by our inquiry the demonstration that poststructuralism cannot cope with voidedness is neither the last nor the least: in actual fact, poststructuralism is a defense against aphanisis qua (hermeneutic) Void.
3. Cf.: "The goal of V/irtual/R/eality/ is to fool people's senses into believing they are in the artificial environment" (Chesher 1993; italics added). Which seems to suggest that in reality they are not. I think that this is an important insight, which, if elaborated, would furnish us with a genuine demstifying critique of the Western tradition, allowing to recognize in poststructuralism the acme of the latter. Unfortunately the author is not valiant enough to pursue this task. Instead he falls back on poststructuralist common-places and in so doing promotes the mystification: "Claiming authenticity for the metaphor is an important way of making technology appear natural and relevant" (italics mine). However we have just heard that the aim of the advocates of Virtual Reality is directly an opposite one. As our discussion proceeds, the reader will see will see that the poststructuralist inability to demistify its adversary is rooted in the inability to account for the fictive status of a given discourse.
4. An even more recent of the same logic comes from one of the (former?) paragons of deconstruction, Geoffrey H. Hartman: "Reading and writing are forms of life, not just reflections of it. Their future is only as strong as a past that continues to exist because of them" (1996: 387; italics mine)
5. Interestingly enough, the advocates of the rhetorical, i.e. narratological, sublime find that "Lyotard's contrast between sublimity and narrativity is a helpful amendment to the Kantian contrast between sublimity and beauty" (Engström 1993: 196). In due time, having traced the logic of this divorce, we will question its necessity.
6. For a sustained discussion cf. Linetski 1996b
7. Cf. Medvedev 1993: 177-178, 182-186; and our commentary which for the first time sets the problem in its true light (Linetski 1996a)
8. One of the reasons to select Weber is that the mentioned substitution is bound to leap to the eye even of the most cursory reader: "We begin to sense that what is involved here ... is a certain kind of a calculated deception, concerning the relation not only of dream and interpretation, but of both to the unconscious ... Or, to put it even more generally, we sense that what is involved in this question is the relation of meaning - which always implies the possibility of consciousness" (1977: 15). Our author has said and done all - up to italicizing the relevant terms.
9. The notion of aphanisis is one of the most neglected ones in psychoanalytic theory. Since Ernest Jones was not stout-hearted enough to introduce it in a reasonably consistent way, we have regarded it as our task to outline the theory of an aphanisis in its relation to general semiotics (Linetski 1996b)
10. Whence the recourse to "generational logic", the theory of scapegoat, the cry to change the canon etc. which make of poststructuralist practice a neat counterpart of patriarchal strategy described in Freud's "The Tabu of Virginity" (1910a).
11. Cf.: "Yes. Donna's [Haraway's] model is only indirectly about human/machine collapse. The other thrust of it, which is not really addressed as much or in as many forums as the cultural thrust, is the cyborg as a totally fantastic, fictional, quasi-real boundary creature ...It's not just machinery, it's that other people are collapsing into us, they're already there, we're already, in a sense, collapsed into each other" (Stone 1994; italics mine). Which explains why Hartman's rebutting of cultural studies for "dissolv/ing/ art into sociological information, as if academic research had remained too pure" (1996: 384), however just in itself, applies equally to the critic himself who opts for the same intertextuality/dialogism (377-388) that underpins cultural studies.
12. According to Freud, precisely the pathological, deviant is the vantage for examining the so-called normal, and not the other way round (Freud 1905a: 59).
13. Contrary to a common belief that "... recent discussions of the sublime, remarkably, all but delete the beautiful and present the sublime as functioning in supreme isolation from its companion and counterpoise, the beautiful ... it is somewhat startling to find that critics influenced by structuralist and deconstructive approaches ignore the neat binarism of 'the sublime and the beautiful' in their rush to the 'real' subject, the sublime. Strangely, we find that the beautiful all but disappears as Thomas Weiskel multiplies binary oppositions within the sublime ..." (Ferguson 1992: 44-45; first and last italics are mine). If there is no place for the beautiful on the level of content of the poststructuralist discourse, then precisely because beauty is its structure and form. In this respect Donald Pease's candidness remains unparalleled. Witness his charge for the necessity, for postmodernist poetics, of dropping out any argument about, and tendency toward, the sublime (Pease 1984).
14. Whence the necessity to re-introduce logocentric binarism: "In dealing with the challenge of the infosphere, utilitarianism, not idealism, seems to be the answer..." (Slusser 1992: 9). And yet the trouble with "today's fiction" stem exactly from "its inability to abolish the barriers and walls /i.e. binaric divisions/ that have traditionally sustained Western narrative fiction" (8). The point of drawing upon 19th-century fiction as a corroboration of our theoretical ruminations is to show that realistic fiction dismissed for its alleged complicity with patriarchal tradition in fact subverts the latter far more effectively than postmodern revolutions. Which means that the much hailed misreading is a form of not- reading. The necessity for this being so will become apparent in the course of our discussion.
15. Precisely this metamorphosis of reincarnation is what Derrida's notion of the phantom boils down to: "Derrida suggests that the phantom requires some medium, for a phantom is that precisely because it lacks the 'medium' by which to effect actual change in the physical world" (Allen 1993).
16. I refer to the title under which the poststructuralist readings of Poe and Lacan-Derrida controversy have been collected: The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and The Psychoanalytic Reading (1988).
17. Fr. Peraldi astutely notes that Poe's "subjects are trapped in an unmeasurable, monotonous time" (1988: 339), failing however to divulge the reason which has nothing to do with mythological underpinnings (Oedipus, of course) but with quite mundane art of practical joke.
18. As one of the theorists of humor would have it, jokes are an instance of the celebrated Zeno's paradox of the Cretan Liar (Fry 1968: 120-123, 149).
19. Such recent titles as Kornblith's Naturalizing Epistemology (1996) or Dretske's Naturalizing The Mind (1996) are quite characteristic of the trend.
20. Derrida was the first to divulge this merger in Kant's aesthetics, however only in order to subscribe to it: the leitmotif of his The Truth in Painting is that sublime is the beautiful (cf. Derrida 1987: 49, 95, 127-131).
21. Cf.: "I will try to associate the possibility of survival for the postmodern individual with a sublime ability to evacuate" (Dainotto 1993); Hertz 1977; cf. further: "Cybertechnology creates two worlds, one virtual, the other material, separate and unequal. The radical division between these two worlds is becoming more apparent today. The struggle to relink technology and ethics ... promises a path of reconciliation" (A. and M. Kroker 1996); "Perhaps the persistent gap between utopian text and real world will be closed in cyberspacial simulation by abandoning both fiction and material reality so that the meeting of the fictional, the utopian, and the real will be in virtuality. Perhaps, too, this would amount ... to a final irrevocable narcissism" (Deery 1995; italics added), to wit, to the reinstatement of the patriarchal value-paradigm rooted in the (over)evaluation of phallus, in the male's narcissistic proud of possessing such a useful utensil. Ironically, this reinstatement is what an attempt to provide a postmodern theory of sublime winds up with: "Can the citing subject be 'uplifted with a sense of proud possession' above the cited material?" (Dainotto 1993; italics added). The problem, as always, is whether one succeeds in making both ends meet.
22. Reducing Poe's story to an affair of identificatory/transferential doubling Derrida (1988: 197-206) begs the answer how does this doubling relate to the principle of equivalence and the announced deconstruction of the latter.
23. Notably, Lacan speaks about "Dupin's intended delivery of the letter to the Prefect of Police" (Lacan 1988: 51; italics mine). The implications of this remark to which thus far nobody has paid any attention were discussed in Linetski 1996b.
24. Whence Derrida's wonder at, and rejection of, Freud's insistence that "fiction presents more opportunities for creating uncanny /sublime/ sensations than are possible in real life" (Freud 1958: 160; Derrida 1981: 268).
25. Which explains why Dainotto's version of deconstruction is bound to suffer the same fate as that of Aesop, and, as we see, this outcome has nothing paradoxical about it: :"if Aesop was the victim of an Apollonian social order, he has become, quite paradoxically, the guarantee for a classical order - think of La Fontaine - which sees in Aesop's fables the explicit moralities of "avarice, panic, vanity, distrust, lust for glory and for flesh, hatred, hope, all the fabled terrors and appetites of the mortal condition, drawn together here now for one last demented frolic." Eventually, whether they were guilty or not of a radical and anti-Apollonian statement, Aesop's fables serviced another artificial but stable moral order. Establishing the tradition of the Aesopian genre tells enough about the institutionalization of fable and the fetishization /i.e. becoming useful/ of narrative constructs" (Dainotto 1993; italics mine).
26. "Indeed, the rather heavy meal can create a digestive disorder, a rampant dyspepsia, and a metabolic chaos. The "urgent message" of the postmodern author is hindered ... Can postmodernism overcome this moment of blockage, this compulsion to cite and repeat - this compulsion to death? One has reason for worrying ..." (Dainotto 1993). And a good reason, indeed. Since even such a radical (at least semantically) attempt to conceive of subversive sublime as an excremental one cannot help structurally collapsing into the discourse of/on the beautiful, clearly there is something which constantly thwarts all the attempts to theorize the sublime. Let me straightaway name this something: the hermeneutic stance which is fundamentally an affair of dialogism/intertextuality. Whence another irony of the situation: if "postmodernism is a story of bullimic excess" (Dainotto), then it is a story of succumbing to the structuralist imperative : "Eat your Dasein" (Lacan 1988: 52)(or, in the idiom of Freud's Kinderstube: thou shalt not leave anything on your plate), which, according to Derrida, makes of the Lacanian stance a logocentric hermenutic one, of the Lacanian semiotics - an affair of idealism.
27. "It seems reasonable to say that the postmodern's initial concern is to de-naturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out that those entities that we unthinkingly experience as 'natural' . . . are in fact 'cultural'; made by us, not given to us. Even nature, postmodernism might point out, doesn't grow on trees" (Dainotto 1993; italics mine). Would if it could!
28. Commenting on Derrida's notion of "La structure restante de la lettre" (Derrida 1988: 187; author's italics), the translator notes that "for Derrida, writing is always that which is an excess remainder, un reste" (207; his italics). It is worth of remark that in Kant's view aesthetic was not a system for storing or delaying use (cf. Ferguson 1992: 73). Whether he has managed to sustain this anti-hermeneutic stance is another matter.
29. "Indeed, if Kant's theory is pressed to its logical conclusion, the judgement on the sublime ceases to be an aesthetic judgement at all" (Weiskel 1976: 85). Which means exactly that "we have /NOT/ come a long way from Kant's sublime" (Dianotto 1993/.
30. Cf. Rex Stout's The Blood Will Tell.
31. This child-like play (Humpty-Dumpty) is what deconstructive practice boils down to (cf. Wigley 1996). No wonder, then, that, on a closer-than-passing inspection (cf. Aycock 1993) it turns out that Derrida fails to deconstruct the play, say, that of Freud's grandson.
32. "The next morning Miss Pole said she had been dreaming of Polly with her new cap on his head /the becoming useless of another object/, while she herself sat on a perch in the new cage and admired him. Then, as if ashamed of having revealed the fact of imagining 'such arrant nonsense' in her sleep, she passed on rapidly to the philosophy of dreams, quoting some book she had lately been reading, which was either too deep in itself, or too confused in her repetition for me to understand it" (331; italics mine). Since the discourse of/on the beautiful (the rhetorical sublime) is essentially an intertextual affair (Engström 1993: 203), an attempt to make an intertextual connection, say, with Henry James's novel In a Cage would irrevocably confine feminism in a cage of patriarchal paradigm. On the other hand, precisely the narrator's innocence bared as the beyond of the logocentric binary of (intertextual) guilt and (intratextual) shame effectively hinders this confinement to take place by undermining the possibility of taking the comfortably beautiful promise of reutilization.
33. Significantly, Felix Guattari grounds his "molecular revolution" which should irrevocably dislocate the patriarchal subjectivity in "selective affinities" (cf. Guattari 1995).
34. This is exactly what should happen in the allegedly radically a-semiotic project of Felix Guattari where "the sign functions like a signal, like a release mechanism" (Guattari 1995; italics added).
35. Henceforth we will italicize familiar notions from the Derridaean paradigm in order to show that the genuine critique of deconstruction leads directly to the "deconstruction of the second degree", or, better to say, to the deconstruction which is worth its name.
36. .Intertextual voracity should "lead not so much to a rejection, but rather to an introjection /to introject = to use/ (admission of the problem, commentary, citation, allusion) which poses a blockage suddenly overcome by a release, and includes any strategy of incorpora-ting social myths and given plots - we might say: history and/as literary tradition - to finally release new stories and new modes of being" (Dianotto 1993).
37. We have started thematizing this fundamental and yet totally neglected Bakhtin's notion in Linetski 1996b. Now we begin to perceive that it represents the vantage for a theory of genuinely new subjectivity the search for which, however urgent it certainly is (Dianotto 1993), thus far remains fruitless.
38. "The fictional mode /should/ seduce readers into projecting themselves into the world portrayed and, by 'seeing' it, to believe in its reality or feasibility" (Deery 1995; italics mine). Against this background it is natural to conclude that cyberspace "resembles literary fiction in that it is generated by code and is a form of projected, conceptual space, generally privileging the verisimilar" (ibid; italics mine). Since, as was shown, the first assumption does not apply even to the traditional fiction, it follows that the cyberspace theory misconceives of the cyberspace itself